Host: Christina Grev
Blog: Ken Bartelt

When the Spanish Flu reached Milwaukee in the fall of 1918, the entire city mobilized to combat the spread of the disease and care for those afflicted with the illness. While all Milwaukeeans played a part in the city’s effective pandemic response, women played a particularly important role. Whether their contributions took the form of the out-of-work teacher volunteering to nurse at the temporary hospital established in the Nunnemacher house, the traveling nurse going door-to-door to care for children whose parents were sick with the flu, or as an emergency ambulance driver, women played an unmistakable role in making Milwaukee the “Healthiest City” during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic.

When Health Commissioner George Ruhland ordered the closure of Milwaukee’s schools, many teachers, the vast majority of them women, found themselves without work. Since Milwaukee’s public school teachers were considered government employees, the city’s health department devised a creative way to use these idle teachers in the fight against the flu. In order to collect data on the spread of the flu in the city, the health department employed teachers to canvass the neighborhoods in the vicinity of their schools, making visits to each house and recording all cases of the flu that they found for the health department. Without the work of these teachers, the health department’s understanding of the flu’s spread in the community would have been greatly diminished.

Some women worked as traveling nurses, visiting Milwaukee homes to care for flu patients and their children. One of these nurses, identified as “Miss Kruse,” reported the following:

“In a few places I found the entire family, consisting of six or seven, all in bed with the ‘Flu.’ The majority of those cases ran high temperatures, which necessitated considerable nursing care. In some cases where the mother was in bed several small children were running around in night clothes and bare feet. These had to be washed, dressed and fed. No neighbors would offer to help because they are afraid of getting the ‘terrible disease.’”

Miss Kruse’s report demonstrates the risk that these nurses took in caring for flu patients. While neighbors avoided the sick so as not to become ill themselves, Milwaukee’s nurses could not socially distance themselves, and as the Milwaukee County Historical Society’s Kevin Abing explains in episode 5 of The Healthiest City, many nurses became infected with the flu themselves. Undoubtedly, the bravery of these nurses saved many Milwaukee families from the Spanish Flu’s most devastating outcomes.